Finding will be whether rural villages get fewer or inferior legal services

Two years of paperwork, two weeks of trial and two hours of closing arguments ended Thursday. Anchorage Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason will decide if law enforcement in mainly Native off-road Alaska villages is so much worse than services available to similar-sized non-Native towns on the road system that it violates the constitution.

Lawrence Aschenbrenner, a Native American Rights Fund attorney representing Native village and individual plaintiffs, said crime victims in off-road villages must wait hours, days and sometimes weeks for Alaska State Troopers to respond.

State-paid village public safety officers or village police officers in about half the 165 off-road villages are unarmed, undertrained and ill-prepared to deal with life-and-death threats, he said. The rest of the off-road villages have no local police at all.

Aschenbrenner asked Gleason to put herself in the place of a domestic violence or assault victim in such a place.

"The overpowering fear has to be enormous," he said.

Attorneys for the state, however, said Aschenbrenner and experts who testified for the Native villages distorted facts and statistics. Law enforcement protection offered to rural villages by state troopers posted in regional hubs and augmented by VPSOs is an efficient service run on a limited budget, said assistant attorney general Jim Baldwin.

Four factors - distance, population density, lack of roads and lack of lighted runways in some villages - make policing in rural Alaska different than in urban Alaska or in other parts of America, Baldwin said. Race is not an issue in allocating trooper resources, he said.